[Air-L] [FlashLab seminar] "Environment & Digital Technologies" series with Jen Liu (Univ. of Toronto): "Ghosting the Coast: Infrastructural Retreat in Southeast Louisiana" - (April 2, 4-5:30 pm, CET)

[valentingjn]

Dear colleagues,

As part of the 2025-2026 FlashLab seminar season, the first session of our quarterly "Environment & Digital Technologies" series will take place online on Thursday, April 2 (4:00-5:30 pm, CET).

We are delighted to welcome [Jen Liu](https://jenliujenliu.com/), Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. She works with the Toronto Climate Observatory and will present a talk drawing on her Ph.D. in Information Science at Cornell University:

Ghosting the Coast: Infrastructural Retreat in Southeast Louisiana

Abstract: As climate change accelerates, infrastructures are increasingly strained by environmental volatility and political neglect. This presentation introduces infrastructural retreat as a concept to describe the gradual withdrawal, degradation, and abandonment of infrastructure. Drawing on ethnographic and design research in southeast Louisiana, I examine how networked infrastructures, particularly Internet connectivity, are maintained amid overlapping ecological disruption, aging systems, and deep socioeconomic inequality rooted in the region’s petrochemical legacy. I show how practices of infrastructural maintenance, repair, and anticipation shape climate habitability by sustaining or denying connection in shifting coastal landscapes. I argue that infrastructural retreat contributes to and conditions climate displacement, redistributing risk onto communities through degraded service and precarious labor. I conclude by discussing how these insights informed the co-design of a community-based communications network, and what infrastructural retreat reveals about the politics of adaptation and survival on a changing planet.

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Session links and other practical information are available through the seminar mailing list. You can subscribe here: flashlab at framalistes.org

The rest of the season’s program will soon be available on the seminar [website](https://flashlabinfo.wordpress.com/les-seances/).

Looking forward to seeing you online!

All the best,
Assia Wirth & Valentin Goujon.

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Valentin Goujon
Doctorant en sociologie
médialab, Sciences Po
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Coordinateur du séminaire [FlashLab](https://flashlabinfo.wordpress.com/) et du GdT «[Matérialités du numérique](https://cis.cnrs.fr/materialites-du-numerique/)»

Projet de recherche ANR-ORA [Shaping AI](https://www.shapingai.org/)
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